


I ask for nothing, but maybe I'm lying

by possessedradios (orphan_account)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's another messy wannabe character study!!, M/M, Mentions of a few canon deaths but nothing explicit, POV Second Person, Spiral-Typical Weirdness, You'll pry Michael-kinda-pining-for-Jon from my cold dead hands I swear.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 11:35:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17580056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/possessedradios
Summary: Maybe you just keep watching him because he's still so bad at seeing things, even though that's all he's supposed to do.But then again, trying to find logical reasons for the things you're doing really doesn't suit you all that well.





	I ask for nothing, but maybe I'm lying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chet_Un_Gwan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chet_Un_Gwan/gifts).



> Title taken from "Ask For Nothing" by Lemon Demon

Sometimes you watch the Archivist, and that’s funny. 

It’s funny, because it’s his job to watch, and to know, but he just sits there, at his desk, and records things, some of which you remember doing, most of which have nothing to do with you, and he doesn’t notice you. Maybe he’s just too used to it – that nagging feeling prickling at the back of his head, a thousand eyes, all looking into his direction; maybe another pair simply doesn’t matter, hardly even feels different. You’d like to ask him, you think, but that would rather ruin the whole secrecy of it all, and you do like to keep yourself secret, for now.

You think you’re not supposed to watch him. You don’t have any strong feelings on him one way or the other, but he is very much expected to resent you. So, staying away would make sense.

But he doesn’t even know all that, not yet; he knows impressively little considering his role. And anyway, you don’t care much for things that make sense.

Naturally.

*

His assistant let you hold her hand, and that was strange, and that was nice. 

His assistant is different now, though, all wrong. No one else can see it, which is a little funny again, because it’s still the Archivist’s job to watch, and to know. 

You watch, and you know, you glance around the doorframe that no one else notices, and you see the large thing with the spindly limbs and the blurred face and the fury in its eyes, see it talking to the other assistants, and sometimes the Archivist, and sometimes the Observer, but the Observer knows, and the fake assistant knows that he knows, so they try not to run into each other, they don’t like each other. 

You’re almost sad that it can’t fool you, because she was nicer with her freckles and her ash-blond hair, but deception is your terrain, no matter how good the fake assistant navigates it. You’re almost sad, and you don’t like that, so you go back to watching the Archivist instead, because he’s funny; he’s worried and angry and scared to death and so very, very human.

*

Someone dreams, and they dream of an endless corridor in the middle of a desert, and at the end of it there’s a door, and they spend the whole dream running towards it, and just a split second before they wake up, they finally reach it, and they turn the doorknob, and the door swings open without a sound. They wake up standing in a lecture room full of empty seats. A projector throws shadowy, flickering images of their past emotions-experiences-doubts-and-fears against the far wall, and the room is filled with the faint hissing sound of static.

You wave at them, smiling brightly. You’re sitting where the professor would be sitting if this was an actual hall in a university building. They stare at your hand, look confused, then terrified. Wonder if they’re still asleep. They’re not. They start to realize that as they spin around to grab the doorknob again and freeze. No doorknob where there is no door.

“Maybe,” you say, and hardly even notice that the expression in their eyes as they turn to stare at you again is one of utter horror, “I should tell him! Maybe. Maybe not, though …” You frown at the desk in front of you. “I just don’t think it’s quite fair, you know, since the fake assistant plays with powers the Archivist is exactly not meant to see through. Funny, how these things work out, isn’t it?”

“I, I– I don’t unde–”

You shush them, put a long finger against your lips and shake your head. They fall silent again quickly. 

“I probably shouldn’t interfere,” you continue, “but then again, I did already! I saved the assistant, I warned her – back when it was still her, of course. But really, the Hive is just so unpleasant.” You consider the person for a moment. “...You should count yourself lucky, really, imagine the worms got you.”

“Wha–”

“Shhh. The Stranger’s not quite as nasty.” You shrug. “But still unpleasant, of course! It’s funny, because he trusts her – it – the most, I think. He’s just so different from the former Archivist, you know.”

Clearly, they don’t know. They look more and more confused, more and more panicked. 

“The other Archivist was cold and cruel. Not that I mind! I was concerned about it, a little bit, back when I was still me and him, but not after I became what I am and he is now. The new Archivist is so human! So desperate. There’s something very compelling about desperation, don’t you think?”

They don’t answer. You sigh and push the chair back, get up, turn around. “You’ll know soon enough,” you say lightly, and touch your hand against the wall. A door appears, and you disappear through it, take it with you. You’ll leave them in there for a few hours-days-weeks, it doesn’t really make a difference to you.

*

Showing yourself to him isn’t something you do impulsively, even though you, of course, do everything impulsively. Mainly you just want to collect the Wanderer, she’s not supposed to be there and talk, she’s supposed to look at the corridors. So you take her back, because she belongs to you now, or to the corridors, or to your Master, it’s all the same, in the end, painfully different.

But, since you’re there, you also warn the Archivist, tell him they’re lying, and he doesn’t get it at all, doesn’t see, doesn’t know. You thought you’d find it funnier than you do. He’s still funny, of course, you just don’t like the joke that much.

*

“Oh. Oh, Archivist, no. That’s not right at all,” you say to yourself as you watch him march into artefact storage, both hands clamped around an axe.

On a whim, you decide to save him.

Your whole world rocks a little in its angles when he steps through your door, and you stare at him, and it only leads into the tunnels, but the single step he makes takes him eons to complete in your reality, and you savor every second of it.

You wish you could keep him for a little longer, but there’s really only so much interfering with a war that’s incredibly point- and meaningless to you that you can justify in front of yourself (not that you care much about your own actions or opinions, but it’s a matter of principal, and your Master starts caring somewhere along the blurry lines of where you stop), so you just trap his assistants and follow to watch the Archivist die, or maybe not.

*

Maybe not, then. 

That’s fine.

That’s nice.

*

You don’t like the woman he’s staying with much. He’s hiding, and he’s so, so scared, and you like that, but the woman feels all wrong, all his fear clashes together incredibly violently with her inability to be afraid.

You think the Observer knows something, because it’s in his nature to know, and also because he sends the Archivist statements to read, statements you forced into existence because you interacted with the ones who gave them.

No one ever notices, but there’s the hint of a door in the kitchen whenever he’s reading one of these accounts, and you always listen, you like it, you like to listen to him while he’s reading about you. His voice gets very distant, and you know, of course, that he feels all that you made the others feel, and it’s intimate in a way that sometimes makes whatever door you’ve created to hide behind change colors. 

There’s a cat, too, and the cat likes you, and the cat, at one occasion, almost walks through your door, and you think you might like cats, too, maybe you could keep it. (Did the former you that stopped existing like cats? You almost remember, but not quite.) However, the Archivist likes the cat very much as well, and he’d be sad if it was gone, and he’d blame himself, even if really it’d be no one’s fault but the cat’s. Either way, you push it back into the kitchen and close your door, you want it to keep purring at the Archivist instead.

*

The Archivist finds out he can get people to talk to him and tell him what he wants, and that’s very, very dangerous, and you’re very, very intrigued by it. You know the other Archivist could do that, too, but you don’t think she used this ability that often, you don’t think she liked it.

The new Archivist does use it, and he does like it, and he worries so much about the potential loss of his humanity. Funny, funny, funny. 

*

“I should stop watching him, because all of this is starting to make way too much sense, even if I manage to not think about it,” you say, standing in the bathtub of an old woman who stares at you with wide eyes.

You only meant to see where all of this was going, you think.

“Watching is not my job,” you say. “I only meant to check if he’d die, but then I didn’t know what to do when he didn’t, and now I’m caught in a spiral of–” You catch yourself off guard with that, and then you laugh, and the old woman starts crying, and you reach out to open the door in her shower curtain.

*

You don’t really know what to do with the Archivist, mostly because he’s still alive.

*

You kill someone and think of the Archivist while you do.

*

Clearly, you should kill him.

*

He gets kidnapped by the Stranger and the Observer throws a coffee cup at one of the walls in his office when the creature who calls itself Nikola talks into the Archivist’s tape recorder in a sing-songy voice, and that, you find very, very funny again.

The former Archivist’s assistant would be terrified of even just being in this room, and he most definitely wouldn’t want to tell any stories, and maybe that’s the reason you make the new Archivist take your statement, or maybe it’s just because he deserves it, because he’s lived for so long. It could be either one of those reasons, or both, or none, maybe it’s something completely different, you don’t have the slightest idea, and you feel very comfortable, because that’s exactly how it’s supposed to go.

*

Ever since you opened your door for him to escape into the tunnels, you wanted him to step over one of your thresholds again, and you think you’re very, very happy that he’s going to do that, now. You intend to keep your promise, too, you’ll make his end a very soft one, a melodic one, one befitting him.

Maybe you’ll go see if the cat still wants to join you, afterwards.

You feel something that almost makes sense when the Archivist agrees to your offer of a gentle death, and there’s still nothing but genuine delight and slight amusement even as he tells you the door is locked.

What a silly concept.

You try it yourself.

*

Oh.

*

Sometimes you watch the Archivist, and you wish it was funny.

He’s the same as you, in a way, not-quite-human-not-quite-something-else.

It’s not your job to watch, so you try talking to him instead, but he gets angry and throws you out of his office, and part of you is hurt, even if you understand.

Some other part of you, buried deep inside, part of you but very, very different, part of you that once was something else entirely, was once part of you, but before you were you, part of you that very much isn’t you, finds this incredibly funny, a joke, but a good one.

You press your hand against your chest and tear it open in the process.

**Author's Note:**

> Well now I'll never stop thinking about some poor old woman walking into her bathroom and Michael just standing in her empty bathtub, monologuing to itself, and that's clearly the best mental image that came of all of this. If you disagree, I'm terribly sorry, but you're wrong.


End file.
